Mark Landsbaum: Fact-challenged climate fear-mongers

Christopher Field, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II, right, speaks with IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri during a press conference in Japan in March. SHIZUO KAMBAYASHI, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The government insists manmade global warming is deadly. That’s an excuse to gain more control over you and the energy industry and, by extension, everything that relies on energy,and to reward special interests at your expense.

Scare stories ratcheted up this week, pointing to a one-year decline in California’s snowpack. But what will the White House say, “after the looming El Niño kicks in later this year, and California has a wetter-than-normal year during the winter of 2014/15 and the snowpack goes up to something like 146 percent of normal?” asks Anthony Watts, an American Meteorological Society-certified meteorologist and operator of the “world’s most viewed [web]site on global warming and climate change.”

Actually, only the politics have changed, not the climate, since 2011, when President Barack Obama dropped the issue like a hot globe. Global warming was a loser for his reelection campaign. Polls consistently rank it at the bottom of public concerns. The Washington Post reported last week that Obama still, “recognizes that global warming ranks as a low priority among voters.”

But Obama’s no longer a candidate. With nothing to lose, he can deflect attention from genuine problems – the economy, the Obamacare catastrophe and Middle East and Russian crises. A government-spawned industry of opportunists queues up to reap rewards.

Obama’s radical green agenda would benefit select cronies who game the system, punish everyone reliant on affordable energy and would do zilch to improve climate.

Be aware of three things:

First, the “settled science” isn’t. It’s not even credible. For almost 18 years, there has been no increase in the Earth’s temperature. Some scientists suggest long-term cooling ahead.

Climate scientistsguess how much of scant warming over the past century was manmade. The computer models predicting future warming can’t even compute what temperatures were.

“Why should we believe model predictions of the future, when they can’t even explain the past?” climatologist Roy Spencer asks.

There’s the disquieting fact that every time temperature records are “adjusted” by people who tell us it’s getting too hot too fast, adjustments always show more, never less, warming.

Meanwhile, there is more Antarctic sea ice than ever recorded. Contrary to alarmists’ claims, the National Weather Service reports the number of strong tornadoes has declined since the early 1970s, and 2013 had 142 fewer than any year on record. Florida State University scientists report global hurricane activity at a 30-year low.

Spencer asks: “How do scientists expect to be taken seriously when their ‘theory’ is supported by both floods and droughts? Too much snow and too little snow?”

Nigel Lawson, member of the U.K. House of Lords and chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, says, contrary to alarmists’ expectations, as China’s coal-based economy boomed, there has been no further warming.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates global warming has occurred at the rate of 0.05 degree Celsius per decade, plus or minus 0.1 C. “In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error,” Lawson notes.

He also says it’s “palpably absurd” to claim to even be capable of calculating meanglobal temperature to hundredths of a degree.

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